25 October 2004

How Bush goes beyond the Bible to create his own reality.

By Jeff Sharlet

The most magical president?

The big religion story of the day — Ron Suskind’s NYT Magazine fisking of Bush’s faith — is also the big political story of the day, and since it follows so closely on Matt Bai’s inadvertent take-down of Kerry, it’ll likely provide wonk-gossip fodder as well. Is this the Times‘ idea of “balance”? More importantly, which aide channeled New Age chanteuse Enya by asserting that “we create our own reality”? Who are the “sources” who set Suskind’s phone a-ringing after the publication ofThe Price of Loyalty? And is George W. Bush the first magical president of the United States?

Well, probably no one will ask that last one, but that’s what I was left wondering after reading Suskind’s report, only the latest in a long series of investigations of Bush’s faith. What’s surprising about Suskind’s summary of Bush’s “walk,” to borrow an evangelical term, is how small a role Jesus Christ seems to play in it. God gets a few cameos, but even he’s a supporting player. Front and center, though, is faith.

Given what we know about Bush, from pro-Bush sources such as Stephen Mansfield’s The Faith of George W. Bush and the documentary George W. Bush: Faith in the White House, from the reasonably neutral Frontline special, “The Jesus Factor,” and from mainstream print investigations such as Alan Cooperman‘s, that’s a fair assessment.

Believing, it seems, is more important to the President than the substance of his belief. Jesus Christ’s particular teachings — well, those are good, too. But what really matters is that if you believe you can do something, you can.

What Suskind misses, and what Bush’s more orthodox Christian supporters seem to dodge, is that this is not Christian doctrine by any definition. It is, in fact, a key element of the broad, heterodox movement known as New Age religion.

A common aspect of many New Age schools of thought (though not all) is a gentle disdain for perceived reality. That’s different from the fundamentalist aversion to worldliness; rather, this approach views the “real world” as that which is within the mind or heart or spirit of the believer. That idea is often dismissed as a modern bastardization of psychology, but many New Agers argue that their beliefs are actually ancient; and, despite the fact that the superficial characteristics are often of a recent vintage, there’s some truth to that assertion. New Age religions are, literally, reactionary, responses to what’s been called the disenchantment of the world. Another word for that process is the Enlightenment, with its claims of empirical accuracy. New Age movements attempt to revive — or create anew –pre-Enlightenment ideas about magic, alchemy, ghosts, and whatever else practitioners can glean from a record for the most part expunged by institutional Christianity.

Christian fundamentalism, meanwhile, is the child of the Enlightenment, a functionalist view of faith that’s metaphorically “scientific.” It’s scripture as read by a cranky engineer who just wants to know how God works. The Bible, for a fundamentalist, isn’t powerful literature demanding our ever-changing discernment; it’s an instruction manual. And fundamentalists think that’s a good thing.

But Bush, we’re told time and again by supporters and detractors, is not a details man. Not much of a reader, either. He is a “heart” person, as pollster John Zogby’s Wizard of Ozcharacterization of the candidates would have it (Kerry the Tin Man, all brains and no heart, vs. Bush the Scarecrow, nothing but heart and straw).

Suskind begins his accounting of the President’s faith with an encounter between Bush and Senator Joe Biden. Biden ticks off the ominous portents of potential failure in Iraq, many of them, apparently, news to Bush. Bush unfazed, replies that all will be well. “‘Mr. President,’” Biden recalls asking, “ ‘how can you be so sure when you know you don’t know the facts?’”

What was the President’s answer? That God told him so? Please. Those who accuse him of hearing voices haven’t been paying attention to what he’s been saying. Did he resort to the fundamentalist instruction manual? Uh-uh. The President, we’ve been told, begins his days not with the Bible but with a pocket-sized book called My Utmost for His Highest, a remarkably opaque collection of daily devotionals published by Oswald Chambers in 1935.

No, Bush’s answer was one only an EST instructor could love: “ ‘My instincts,’” he reportedly told Biden. “ ‘My instincts.’”

In this particular sense, Bush does seem to be a descendent of the Enlightenment: He’s Rousseau’s noble savage, operating on the pure, animal instincts that’re true because theyare, and are because they’re true. The noble savage does not live in what Bush’s aide contemptuously calls “the reality-based community”; he is in and is of a “nature” more real than reality, which, in an unexpected nod to postmodernism, Bush believers seem to dismiss as a social construct.

Suskind and other Bush detractors (and make no mistake, Suskind’s story is a hit piece — a smart, informative hit piece, but a hit piece all the same) document Bush’s tautological thinking, but they fall short of taking it seriously. That’s a point Mark McKinnon, one of Bush’s media advisors, tries to hammer home in brutal fashion when he tells Suskind, “ ‘When you attack him for his malaprops, his jumbled syntax, it’s good for us. Because you know what [Bush supporters] don’t like? They don’t like you!’”

Beyond the schoolyard shoving aspects of this declaration, there’s some insight. Suskind reads McKinnon’s comment as an attack on snobbery; in fact, it’s an angry defense of positive thinking, of creating one’s own reality. Bush believers long for absolutes, but they don’t care about empirical definitions. They’re not literalists, in the sense that they don’t cling to language. In fact, they don’t trust language, which is why they read clunky, soulless translations of scripture, when they read it at all. The Community Bible Study approach to biblical education through which Bush found his faith is not based on intense reading, but on personal meditations built around a sentence or two. Bush himself doesn’t study the Bible; he samples phrases and invokes them like spells.

Much has been said about his subtle use of scriptural citations as “coded” signals to his base. But every account of his worldview suggests that he sees no need to be sneaky. He is not sending secret messages. When he speaks of “wonderworking power” (a reference to the gospel standard “Power in the Blood”), as he did in his now infamous “mission accomplished” speech, he is drawing that power into being, to make his desires into reality. Politics, strategy, books, the Bible — everything falls away in the realm of magical realism.

There’s a line in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed that’s always haunted me with its suggestion of a faith that transcends its own meaning. Shatov, a romantic nationalist, asks the radical Stavrogin, “Wasn’t it you who said that even if it was proved to you mathematically that the Truth was outside Christ, you would prefer to remain with Christ outside the Truth?”

Stavrogin denies it (he is, in contemporary parlance, a flip-flopper), but Shatov won’t be moved. He’s fallen in love with this formulation and he decides to cleave nearer still to its tautological mysticism — history, politics, scripture, even Truth be damned.

It’s not for nothing that proto-fundie Dostoyevsky sometimes gets called a pagan. That beautiful, terrifying sentiment is a rebuke to all systems, to all theories, to the disenchantment of the world; indeed, it exists on a sort of astral plane, where Christ floats freely, unbound by scripture, a God not to be discerned, but rather, a God felt from within.

Some will note the Gnostic resonance of such a belief system, but in the modern world it owes more to the resilience of magical thinking than to Gnosticism popularizer Elaine Pagels, who probably has not made it onto the ultra-exclusive short list of the President’s reading material.

But Suskind doesn’t even touch on that possibility. Although Suskind gladly admits that he’s a member of the “reality-based community,” he’s open-minded enough not to simply contrast his worldview with that of Bush’s. Rather, he finds a what he thinks is a middleground between the two in the person of Jim Wallis, a liberal evangelical leader to whom he gives the last word. “ ‘Real faith’” Wallis declares, “ ‘leads us to deeper reflection and not — not ever — to the thing we as humans so very much want…. Easy certainty.’”

I happen to like the idea that faith is a path away from easy certainty, but I know it’s just that — an idea. Wallis’ idea, and that of one strain of Christianity. It’s not an idea shared by many New Age religions. Such beliefs emphasize that certainty is easy, if you’ll just give up the illusion of reality, since certainty is as close to you as your own heart. One need not investigate with the tools of rationalism, but rather, simply — the simplicity of it all is key — feel.

Bush feels. The press, so far, does not. In grappling with Bush’s presidency, it has expanded its range, developed a more nuanced understanding of traditional Christian fundamentalism, recognized liberal evangelicalism, and acknowledged the limitations of Enlightenment thinking. But it still can’t account for the kind of magic that says, If you believe you can do something — become president despite losing the popular vote, launch a war without evidence, and maybe, if you REALLY believe, get re-elected anyway — you can.

Jeff Sharlet is co-author of Killing the Buddha and editor of The Revealer.